Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came

by Beaton, M. C.

  He turned slowly and looked at her. His face was seamed and lined and his shoulders were stooped. He wiped his hands on an old pair of flannels, held one out and solemnly shook Agatha’s hand.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I wondered if you could draw me a plan of your shop as it once was, showing me where the freezer, the cold room, was situated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m writing a book,’ lied Agatha, ‘and I have this butcher’s shop in it. I need a layout.’

  ‘So why don’t you just go to the butchers in,

  say, Moreton, and ask them to show you around?’

  ‘Because I’m setting it in the past,’ said Agatha desperately. ‘I need an old-fashioned butcher’s shop.’

  He indicated a gleaming white plastic table surrounded by hard plastic chairs on the deck. ‘Let’s sit down and I’ll get a piece of paper.’

  Agatha sat down and he shuffled off into the house. He seemed to be gone a very long time. She waited impatiently.

  At last he reappeared, holding a sheet of white A4 paper and a ball-point pen. He sat down beside her with painstaking slowness and then said, ‘Let me see, the counter was here as you came in the door. Had to be a cold counter, you know, glassed in. Bloody European regulations!’ He began to draw with neat, draughtsmanlike precision.

  ‘Through this door behind the counter was a short corridor and then a big area at the back. Deliveries came in by the back door. We cut up the meat in this room. There was a toilet here, and then a kitchen.’

  ‘The freezer?’ prompted Agatha.

  ‘The cold room was just here, at the end of the large room at the back. Inconvenient place, but it would have cost too much to move it.’ His pen moved on, neatly sketching everything in. Agatha waited patiently while he drew a plan of the upstairs as well.

  ‘Those disco people got it cheap,’ he grumbled, ‘because of all the conversion they’d have to do. I wanted to sell it to a butcher, but what butchers are there nowadays? The supermarkets have killed most of us off. The last straw was the E. coli scare. And the beef-on-the-bone scare. Couldn’t sell a joint of meat on the bone anywhere, and that took extra butchering time. Damn government. You put that in your book. The government helped to kill us off, us and the farmers. I’d shoot the lot of them. Want a drink?’

  Agatha decided, as she had not planned to go to the disco until the next evening, the least she could do would be to give him some more of her time. ‘That would be nice.’ She was just about to say she would have a gin and tonic, when he added, ‘I make the best dandelion wine in the Cotswolds.’ Agatha resigned herself.

  He shuffled indoors again. Birds chirped sleepily in the neighbouring gardens but no bird sang in Mr Gringe’s stark garden. The evening sky stretched overhead, a pale green deepening to dark blue at the horizon. Somewhere deep inside her, a voice was telling her she was being dangerously silly, that she should turn over everything she had to the police.

  Mr Gringe came shuffling back carrying a tray with a bottle and two glasses. He poured out two large glasses of dandelion wine. ‘Here’s to you,’ he said. Agatha raised her glass. ‘Good health.’

  ‘So what name do you write under?’ he asked.

  ‘Agatha Raisin.’

  ‘Never heard of you.’

  ‘Do you read much?’

  ‘No, I’ve got the telly.’

  ‘Then that’s why you haven’t heard of me.’ Agatha looked out over the garden. ‘Don’t you like plants?’

  ‘Waste of time. They get aphids and slugs and then they’re always dropping leaves and making a mess.’

  ‘Some people think it worth the effort to look out at pretty flowers.’

  ‘Some people need their heads examined. Are you married?’

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Have you any money?’

  ‘I’m comfortably off.’

  He suddenly leered at her. ‘Don’t do to be on your own. Tell you what. You can marry me. I’m tired of all the cleaning and scrubbing, and that’s women’s work.’

  ‘Then you should employ a cleaner.’

  ‘Pay someone to do it? No, that’s where you come in.’

  ‘And this is where I go out,’ said Agatha firmly, putting her glass on the table. The wine was sweet and heavy and she did not think she could bear to swallow another sip.

  ‘You’re missing out,’ he called after her as she snatched up the plan of the butcher’s shop and made for the side of the house and escape. ‘You’re lucky to get an offer at your age.’

  Chapter Ten

  Mrs Bloxby called on Agatha the following evening, just as Agatha was ready to go out. The vicar’s wife gloomily surveyed Agatha in full disguise. ‘You’re actually going to do it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Agatha calmly, just as if she had not been wrestling with doubts and fears all day.

  ‘Is it any use me trying to point out to you that you are putting your life in danger?’

  ‘None whatsoever. Anyway, I’m only going to locate the place – if they still have the freezer room. Then I’ll leave and phone the police.’

  They walked outside together. ‘I’ll be all right,’ said Agatha, getting into her car. ‘I tell you what. If I’m not back by midnight, then you can phone the police.’

  Agatha parked in the car-park at Merstow Green and studied Mr Gringe’s map. It was going to be difficult. Terry Jensen had obviously had the wall that had existed between the front and back premises knocked down to make room for the disco. Did the disco dance-room extend right through to the back door? Or was there still a space left at the back with a hidden door somewhere? There might be. Goods might be delivered at the back door.

  Agatha got out of the car, wishing now she had let Charles come with her. She felt very alone.

  Wayne, the bouncer, was standing outside the club. ‘Television again,’ said Agatha briskly. ‘Just going to soak up the atmosphere.’

  Wayne stood aside to let her pass. The disco was quieter than the last time Agatha had been there. There were fewer couples gyrating on the floor, although the music was still as loud as ever. She hoped it would soon fill up to disguise the fact that she would be searching around the walls. She went to the bar where Terry was on duty. She shouted at him that she was just getting a feel of the place and ordered a bottle of beer. As she sipped her beer, she looked carefully round about. Then she thought, there must be a toilet somewhere. It might be situated in the back premises. ‘Got a ladies’ room?’ she shouted at Terry.

  He opened a door at the side of the bar which Agatha had not noticed before because it was part of a painted mural of a dancing couple. He jerked his head. Agatha walked through. ‘On the left,’ he shouted.

  There were two toilets, one marked ‘Gals’ and the other, ‘Guys’. As he was still watching her, Agatha went into the ‘Gals’ and into one of the cubicles. She sat down on the lavatory seat and took her map out and studied it again. Outside had been dark except for dim lights above the toilet doors. Surely Terry would have gone by now. He couldn’t watch every woman who decided to go to the toilet.

  Agatha made her way out and looked quickly around. Beer crates and cases of soft drinks were stacked against the opposite wall. She looked at her map again. If the freezer room was still there, it would be behind those crates and cases. Quickly, she began to move them away from the wall, panting with the effort. The wall behind was covered with a dirty curtain. She paused in her efforts and tried the back door. It wasn’t locked. Good, thought Agatha. If I find something, I can escape that way. It was when she started on the cases in the central section that she realized they were empty. She began to throw them behind her, confident that the music from the disco would cover the noise. What if someone came in to use one of the toilets? But she would have to risk it. She would think of some excuse. She would scream and say she had seen a rat. When she had cleared a big enough space, she lifted the curtain and peered underneath. It was too dark to see anything. She
fumbled in her handbag until she located a pencil torch. She shone it up and down the wall.

  And then her heart began to thump. There was a wooden door with a metal handle. The freezer room. She ducked under the curtain and seized the handle and pulled the heavy door open, to be met by a blast of icy air. Agatha went inside. She fumbled inside the door for a light switch until she found it and pressed it down. Fluorescent strip lighting snapped on overhead.

  Agatha let out a cry of pure terror.

  Sitting on the floor with her head at an awkward angle was Joanna Field. Agatha put a hand up to her lips. Move! screamed her brain. Get out! Get the police. The air was full of the thud of the disco music pounding in her ears. And then there was a louder thud. She swung round. The door had been slammed shut behind her.

  ‘Something’s worrying me, Alf,’ said Mrs Bloxby.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ asked the vicar.

  ‘It’s about Agatha Raisin.’

  ‘Oh, that silly woman. What’s she been up to now?’

  Mrs Bloxby explained about Agatha’s visit to the disco and why she had gone.

  ‘Then you must tell the police immediately,’ said the vicar.

  ‘She made me promise I wouldn’t.’

  The doorbell rang. ‘Maybe that’s her,’ said Mrs Bloxby. She hurried to open the door. John Armitage stood there. ‘I’ve just got back from London,’ he said. ‘Where’s Agatha?’

  ‘Come in,’ urged Mrs Bloxby. ‘I’d better tell you.’

  She repeated what she had just told her husband. ‘You said you wouldn’t tell the police,’ said John when she had finished. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘The phone’s over there,’ said Mrs Bloxby eagerly.

  John phoned Worcester police, was put through to Brudge and began to talk rapidly, ending up with ‘You must get men there now. Her life could be in danger.’

  He finally put down the phone. ‘They’ll get there as quickly as possible. I’m going there myself.’

  ‘We’ll go with you,’ said Mrs Bloxby, ignoring the vicar’s pleas that any rescue should be left to the police. They piled into the vicar’s ancient Morris Minor and headed for Evesham.

  ‘Can’t this car of yours go any faster?’ asked John at one point.

  ‘I am not ruining my engine for one silly woman,’ remarked the vicar.

  Agatha walked up and down, desperately beating her arms at her sides. What a way to end! Frozen to death. And poor Joanna. She must have found something incriminating in Kylie’s e-mails and tried to blackmail them. Agatha felt sick with cold and despair. She was about to die and all because of vanity. She had wanted to solve the case herself, have all the glory. She would never see James again. There were shelves inside the room stacked with boxes. She pulled open one with frozen fingers and found plastic packets of white powder. So this was where they kept the drugs. Kylie must have known. Kylie must have found out. Poor Kylie. Poor Joanna. And poor Agatha.

  The shivering finally stopped and she began to feel sleepy and almost warm. She had a paradoxical desire to take all her clothes off and fought against it.

  The vicar parked up on the pavement outside the disco and the three got out. Wayne blocked their way as they tried to walk into the disco. ‘It’s for young people only,’ he said truculently.

  ‘Then I shall report you immediately to the police for ageism,’ said the vicar loftily.

  Wayne gave him a hunted look but the word ‘police’ acted as an open sesame. They walked into the disco. Music assailed their ears. Couples were dancing. It all looked very normal, except that they could not see Agatha. John shouldered his way towards the bar, with the Bloxbys close behind. ‘Where’s the television researcher?’ he demanded. Terry gave a final polish to a glass. ‘You’ve just missed her,’ he shouted. ‘Left ten minutes ago.’

  John gave him a baffled look. Agatha could be up in the office.

  He swung round and shouted to Alf, ‘What can we do now?’

  ‘I have prayed,’ said the vicar calmly. ‘The police will be here.’

  ‘Praying’s a fat lot of good,’ shouted John but the words were no sooner out of his mouth than the music suddenly died and the disco was full of police, headed by Brudge.

  Terry had turned a muddy colour. John thought quickly. If there was a cold room left over from the days when there had been a butcher’s shop, it would be on ground level.

  ‘Through the back,’ he said to Brudge. ‘There must be some way through the back.’

  ‘There’s a door here, sir,’ said a policeman with sharper eyes than Agatha Raisin.

  ‘That’s the toilets, and the stores, nothing else,’ said Terry.

  ‘Watch him and see he doesn’t get away,’ said Brudge. He walked through the door beside the bar. He took out a torch and shone it around, shone it up and down the stack of soft-drink cases and beer crates and then on the floor. He saw faint scrape marks on the floor, as if someone had pulled the cases back. Then he remembered in a report when the disco had been searched that said behind the crates there was an old freezer room, but it had been full of stores and junk and the refrigerator unit had been disconnected.

  ‘Move those crates and cases as fast as you can,’ he barked at his men. ‘And pull down that curtain behind them.’

  Inside, shivering Agatha had realized that there was no longer the dim thud of the music. She heard the crates being moved from behind the door. She heard voices. She did not scream because she was sure they had come to make sure she wasn’t going to live any longer. From the looks of Joanna, someone had broken her neck.

  Agatha looked around for a weapon. But there was nothing.

  She would never forget the moment when the door swung open and she found herself staring at Detective Inspector Brudge. ‘Oh, you lovely man,’ cried Agatha and flung herself sobbing into his arms.

  Brudge pried himself loose. ‘Get her to an ambulance,’ he barked, ‘and search this place. My God, that’s the missing girl!’

  Agatha then was embraced by Mrs Bloxby, who wrapped her in the vicar’s jacket. ‘I’m a fool,’ sobbed Agatha.

  ‘There, now,’ soothed Mrs Bloxby. ‘It’s all over.’

  An ambulance arrived and Agatha was wrapped up and stretchered in. A policewoman got in beside her.

  Mrs Bloxby caught hold of the ambulance driver as he was about to climb into the ambulance. ‘Will she be all right?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘She seems to be suffering from moderate hypothermia.’

  The ambulance roared off.

  Agatha recovered quickly and awoke from a refreshing sleep two days later just as Brudge and two detectives entered the hospital room. ‘Strong enough to make a statement?’ asked Brudge.

  The one thing Agatha lied about was her reasons for not phoning the police. She said it was such a long shot that she decided to have a look herself.

  At last, when the statement was over, Agatha said, ‘But why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘I guess they killed Kylie because she’d found out about the drugs. But why not leave her body where it was and then take it out some dark night and bury it?’

  Brudge signalled to the others to leave and settled back in a chair beside the bed. ‘May as well tell you the whole thing. Zak cracked. What happened was this. He really did mean to marry Kylie and he was in love with her. But idiot that he was, he told her about the drugs. Now he and his father had no previous criminal records. But one of the major Birmingham gangs heard about him setting up the disco in Evesham. They approached Terry Jensen with an offer. If he stored the drugs for them, he’d be a very rich man. He wasn’t to distribute them in the disco. He was merely to store them so they could be picked up and distributed elsewhere in the Midlands. Now Zak may have been in love with Kylie, but Kylie doesn’t seem to have been in love with Zak. She thought this little bit of information was gold and began to demand all sorts of things from Terry, like, after they were married, she wanted a Ferrari.

  ‘Ter
ry told Zak she’d have to go. He was appalled, but it was either Kylie, or himself and his father serving a long prison sentence. She had been bitching about the wedding gown and somehow he persuaded her to slip out one night and bring it round to the club. They’d switched off the refrigeration in the cold room. Told her to go in there – they had it uncovered – and try it on. Then they shut the door and locked it and turned on the refrigeration. With all she had drunk, it made the process of hypothermia quicker.’

  ‘But wouldn’t her hands have been bruised, hammering on the door?’ asked Agatha.

  ‘There were no injuries to her arms. I think she thought they were playing a joke on her until it was too late. When she was weak enough, they injected her with heroin.’

  ‘But why the river and why the bouquet?’

  ‘Zak was sick with misery. He had loved her. He wanted her to have a more ceremonious burial than the one his father had planned for her. He bought the roses – where, we still don’t know. Somehow he got her to the river, still in her wedding gown, and as a last farewell, he thrust the bouquet into her frozen hands. I think he must have been a bit off his head with grief, because he thought, in all the chaos of the floods, that it might be assumed she was another flood victim, wedding dress and all.’

  ‘And what about Joanna?’ asked Agatha.

  ‘They got tipped off – we’re still trying to find out who did that – and someone struck her as she was getting into Kylie’s e-mail and then wiped all the e-mails out. But Joanna did find one incriminating e-mail before she was hit. Zak says he sent her a desperate e-mail, saying to keep her mouth shut.

  ‘Joanna knew she was on to something. She called round at the disco and told Terry about the e-mail and that unless he paid up, she was going to go to the police. He broke her neck.’

  ‘And Mrs Anstruther-Jones?’

  ‘It could be youths who made a habit of getting high on drugs and frightening people by driving at them. They may have gone too far. Zak denies they had anything to do with it, but Terry, or that Wayne, may have thought it was you and decided to stop you asking questions about Kylie.’